Saturday, May 29, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Getting lots of little things "out of the way". It never ceases to amaze me how some tasks that seem "big" are actually easy to accomplish whereas those that one thinks will be quick and easy to do often end up taking forever to complete.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Getting to play PS2 / Wii games as part of my planning for the Computer Science course that I teach. I have a suspicion that if more of our Y9 students realised that gaming was part of the Y10 IT course, our IT classes would be much bigger.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: That my IT students are finally realising that it is important that they document their work. We had some excellent conversations today where we looked at how well the robots were performing a particular task and then discussed how this could be written up in an evaluation.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Breathing space when it comes to work. It turns out that like me, my colleagues are running later than planned with our one topic which gives me more time to work on the plan for the next topic.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Figuring out how work the "caption" feature of Geogebra. This makes creating diagrams for teaching / assessments a lot easier. Knowing how to make the font size bigger also helps although this feature is somewhat limited (geogebra is free and powerful, but its not perfect).

Friday, May 21, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: That the IRD (ie: Kiwi version of the IRS) *finally* processed my rebate claim. Its a long *boring* story which involved contacting the IRD, my accountant (aka Tax agent) and eventually the Minister for Revenue and my local member of parliament. In the end it got sorted for which I'm grateful. Needless to say all of the pain could have been prevented if the IRD were more human and less of a faceless bureaucracy.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Figuring out a cool way to get my Smart Board presentation to do what I need it to do. Lets just say that said solution should make teaching fractions to my Maths group that little bit easier.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Lets just say that "Sinai Star" covers had run their course. I've paraphrased and shortened the basic rules and covered myself by putting in a reference to the original text. At least this one should generate some discussion.

I know that the law and justice are not the same thing. I'd argue that in order to have any hope of justice, some sort of legal system must be in place. Of course having a legal system does not by any means guarantee justice.

Today's Gratitude Item: Not having dance this week! I love dance but am coming down with a cold and not having to dance means not worrying about infecting other members of the group. Of course in a perfect world, I'd be 100% healthy and we'd get to dance but life is never perfect.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Finally being told when the art auction where the original piece from my phone book entry will be. The big day is scheduled for the 23rd June (unless they postpone it - again). I'm just hoping that it finally happens and that the piece sells for an insane amount of money (all funds raised from the auction go to charity).

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Making it through the storm. I went to visit a friend who is an hour away (by car). Only problem is that shortly after leaving home, the heavens opened. Lets just say that driving through walls of water was rather difficult and I'm grateful I got where I was going safely.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Somehow finding time to mark all my Math group's homework and comment on drafts that my Science students have submitted. The evil part of me is grateful that half of my Science class did not submitted a draft - it means less work for me and if they did not submit anything and get a low grade as a result, they have only themselves to blame. The actual assignment is due on Friday so my weekend should be rather fun (insert deep sigh here).

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: That my version of Apophysis is behaving again. Last night it was throwing up some pretty strange errors and refusing to save (inconvenient when you have a nice image that you've spent a lot of time on). Happily everything seems to be back to normal today which is a big relief.

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Finally getting iTunes 9.1 to download. My computer has been prompting me for months to do it but everytime I tried, the thing stalled and failed. It seems to be an issue with larger downloads but I've finally figured out how to get most downloads to proceed (its a slow painful process, but it works). I'm seriously thinking about having another shot at downloading the latest version of AVG. I had it before but the update would not download so I was forced to ditch it which was a great pity. Its replacement Avira is OK but its more intrusive than AVG and is starting to grate.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: That my students are relatively forgiving when I make mistakes. I messed up today and thought I was teaching them in period 6 (when it should have been period 5). One of them noticed I was on-line at the time and emailed me telling me that they were waiting for me. Even better, when I arrived in class, they were all working quietly doing exactly what they were meant to be doing! They only hassled me a little bit about being late. Did I mention that I have an awesome 9th grade class?

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Getting requests from both Indelible Ink and Jewish card.com to use my artwork in their greeting cards. It looks likely that both will be able to use my images in some way which is very exciting. The weird thing is that this is the first time card companies have asked to use my work and getting two requests in such a short space of time was quite strange (in a good way). Happily, it is unlikely that the companies will want identical images as their focuses are reasonably different - one company went for my fractal stuff whilst the other preferred one of my non-fractal pieces.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: That the "lock down" drill at school today went well. It was the first time we have practiced a "lock down" and all my students knew what to do. Best of all, unlike a fire-drill we did not waste too much time. I told my class to keep working and that no one was allowed to talk. It worked a treat :)

Monday, May 03, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: Realising that today is the anniversary of Golda Meir's birthday. First came the wallpaper above, then I needed a suitable quotation. Having found the quotation, I looked up Golda Meir on wikipedia and discovered that she was born on the 3rd of May. Its good when things work out that way.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Today's Gratitude Item: The new, improved single fold that we have at the library where I volunteer once a month. This really cool product makes covering books which have dust jackets incredibly easy. The improved version has the adhesive already on it so now no tape is needed and the job is very, very quick.